When teaching composers about voice, giving a class on the talk box & the vocoder is a great complement. Here are a couple of notes I took to prepare the class I'm giving tomorrow.Talk boxThe talk box is mostly known as an effect enabling to apply vocalic sound colors to guitar sounds. My teaching material includes:a copy of the original patent for an electronic voice box apparatus, designed to be used as an artificial larynx.a video of Peter Frampton performing with guitar & talk box (the device is used from around 5:40 in the video):a picture of Peter Frampton's talk box, by Carl Lender:drawings on the blackboard, to remind students about formants, resonances of the vocal track, voiced and un-voiced sounds, vocal folds, guitar strings, and more.VocoderGoing from the talk box to the vocoder, it's going from real-world formants to modeled ones, where the resonances are not made by a human's vocal tract, but thanks to electronic resonator circuits. The Moog voco…

Martin Jaroszewicz just made available a free application that might be useful to composers & music producers: Spectral Tools. He programmed it with Max & Jitter.In case you want to control more details, tweak the analysis parameters to suit your own sounds, feel free to make your own version from the patches you'll find under my name on Cycling 74's share page. But using Martin's work, you benefit from a nice interface, you can go straight to making music!

Yesterday, I attended the last concert of the Screaming Headless Torsos’ European Tour 2010. David Fuze Fiuczynski is an amazing musician - I already told you when he came to talk with the composers at Harvard.The band was in great shape. The essence of today's funk, straight from New-York. And a killer duo made of drummer Louis Cato and percussionist Daniel Sadownick.In addition to playing originals, they kept with the tradition of playing “standards”: like Bach when he was re-writing Vivaldi, like the boppers when they were playing the Broadway hits, the Torsos rendered the most funky version of Michael Jackson’s Remember the Time. Well, they also played Charlie Parker, it was a “jazz” concert, after all.Amazon.com Widgets